When the winds died down, we surveyed the damage on our property. A eucalyptus tree had crushed a fence, our mailbox had been blown out of the ground. But we were fine. Then my phone started lighting up with text messages from friends and family and breaking-news alerts. While we were sheltering in our home, winds had ripped across the island at up to 80 miles an hour, knocking over large trees and electric poles, igniting several fires that then raced through forests, cattle ranches, and old, abandoned sugar-plantation fields now overgrown with invasive grasses and baked by years of drought. The town of Lahaina burned to the ground in a matter of hours; 102 people were killed.